MobileMe Status — Steve Jobs has asked me to write a posting every other day or so to let everyone know what's happening with MobileMe, and I'm working directly with the MobileMe group to ensure that we keep you really up to date. In the 14 days since we launched, it's been a rocky road …

Apple's Culture of Secrecy — “No one wants to die,” said Apple's chief executive, Steven P. Jobs. “And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.” — It was a little over three years ago that Mr. Jobs spoke those existential words, in a commencement address at Stanford.

Google Walks Away From Digg Deal — The Google/Digg acquisition negotiations were in full swing as of last Tuesday, had passed the term sheet stage and the two companies were in final negotiations in the $200 million range. But sometime this last week Google decided to walk from the deal.

Satellite Radio Merger Approved — The government has approved the long-delayed merger of the nation's only satellite radio companies, combining Sirius and XM into a single entity with 18 million subscribers. — The decision last night came almost a year and a half after the companies first proposed joining.

It's Official: Sirius-XM Gets Thumbs Up From FCC (SIRI, XMSR) — The deal-that-never-wants-to-go- through is finally through: Late today, the FCC finally approved Sirius' (SIRI) $3.6 billion merger with rival satellite radio operator XM (XMSR). — An embarrassment for the FCC, which took way too long to give the deal the thumbs-up.

Blogging's Glass Ceiling — FOR two days last week, many of the men's bathrooms at the Westin St. Francis Hotel here were turned into women's bathrooms. The stalls on the second floor were lined with note cards featuring nurturing messages like “You are perfect.”

San Francisco DA discloses city's network passwords — In its bid to protect the city from one computer security risk, the San Francisco District Attorney's Office may very well have created another. — The office of San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris has made public close …

My Hiatus From Twitter - Why You Should Join Me … Yesterday I announced I am permanently and officially on hiatus from Twitter. Bloggers and other Twitter users, while annoyed, are giving them too much attention in both the negative and positive forms, and frankly, both of these only help Twitter.

Hammer drops at last: FCC opposes Comcast P2P throttling — Once FCC Chair Kevin Martin announced his support for sanctions against Comcast, penalties looked inevitable. The two Democrats on the Commission, long supportive of network neutrality, seemed set to vote along with Martin …

OSCON day 3: Reflections on OSCON 2008 — Today was the last day of OSCON and I'm in the mood to think about the conference and share some of my random observations that didn't make it into any of my other blog posts. — First up is a comment that Brian Aker of MySQL fame made during the …

Plista: Ad-hoc social networks for product recommendations — Of the 20 or so demos set out to bake in the afternoon sun on the August Capital patio for the TechCrunch party Friday, my award for the most interesting goes to Plista, a social recommendation service that follows what you like and don't across sites.

21 months later, Vista is still more secure than XP — Last October, roughly one year after the release to manufacturing of Windows Vista, I did a comparison of how well Windows Vista was living up to its promise of being more secure than its predecessor, Windows XP (see “One year later, Vista really is more secure").

Microsoft pledges love and money to open source — OSCON After years of hostility towards Free Software Foundation (FSF) licensing (here and here) Microsoft has announced the first in a series of PHP patches - and it's using an FSF license. — Microsoft told The Reg it's submitted a patch …